Ted Farrell, of Oracle, has clarified the future of Kenia.com: "Our plan is to shut down kenai.com and focus our efforts on java.net as the hosted development community. We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net. We are still working out the technical details, but the goal is to make this migration as seamless as possible for the current kenai.com projects..."

by Susan Mitchell: "Agility is a word we hear a lot these days, but there are a variety of methods to implement it within the Java Community Process (JCP) program. Most people grasp the basic idea of being quick, but there is much more involved than sheer speed of development or time to market. There are additional meanings, such as the quality of being mentally alert, skill at changing direction, and the ability to maintain control even during times of stress..."

Janice Heiss interviews Adam Bien in a new Sun Developer Network article. Adam's opening statement: 'Good UI controls and layout are the key to success. JavaFX was very strong from the beginning in effects and graphics. It was, however, initially lacking in good, "skinnable" components, but this was fixed with version 1.2. JavaFX requires writing less code while it integrates very well with existing business logic written in Java. A reason to go the JavaFX route is better maintainability, and faster development with less code...'

by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine: "Having GlassFish v3 usable in embedded mode made it easy to create a maven plugin with multiple goals (see this previous entry). This in turn makes it easy to configure the plugin for maven-driven unit testing. Here's an example..."

Christopher Lam posted How to Create a Scheduler Module in a Java EE 6 Application with TimerService: "Many a time, in a Java EE application, besides the user-triggered transactions via the UI (e.g. from the JSF), there's a need for a mechanism to execute long running jobs triggered over time, e.g., batch jobs. Although in the EJB specs there's a Timer service, where Session Beans can be scheduled to run at intervals through annotations as well as programmatically, the schedule and intervals to execute the jobs have to be pre-determined during development time and Glassfish does not provide the framework and the means to do that out-of-the-box. So it is left to the developer to code that functionality or to choose a 3rd party product to do that..."

Test your knowledge with Janice Heiss's Annual Developer Quiz: "For this quiz, SDN staff author Janice J. Heiss surveyed past interviews with leading Java developers in search of questions that might challenge, inform, entertain, amuse, and provoke you. The questions aspire to reflect both the intellectual curiosity and spirit of fun to be found in the Java community. We hope you enjoy taking this quiz... Test your knowledge of Java technology and computing..."

Parts 2 and 3 of the Chris Wright and James Weaver article series "What's New in JavaFX 1.2 Technology" were recently published on the Sun Developer Network. Part 2 covers RSS, Storage, and Charts. Part 3 covers JavaFX Charts in greater detail. Thanks to Janice Heiss for pointing us to the latest additions to this series.

Sebastien Arbogast talks about My Devoxx Discoveries of the Year: "Every year, the main reason why I go to Devoxx is to discover new stuff. For me it’s all about technology watch. The internet and RSS feeds are my main tech watch instrument but there is one thing that is harder to get through RSS: feelings. Conferences like Devoxx are a unique opportunity, not only to see what’s happening but also to sense how the community is feeling about it, which is at least as important to anticipate on what’s going to be important..."

Terrence Barr invites us to Check out Java Card 3.0 Connected Edition: Real Java, just really flat ;-): "Java Card 3.0 was released a couple of months ago – and the second update (version 3.0.2) is scheduled for December. If you haven’t paid much attention to Java on smart cards because you thought it’s not “real” Java – well, look again. It’s true that Java Card 2 was very limited in many ways – a testament to the kind of technology you had available on smart cards 10 years ago. There are billions of these out there today..."

Josh Marinacci's has created a new JavaFX open source interactive artwork project, Project MaiTai: "What is MaiTai? MaiTai is an open source tool for building interactive artwork. You create interesting sketches by wiring different blocks together with lines. There are blocks to produce graphics, process mouse and keyboard inputs, connect to webservices, and perform complex graphical transformations. The end result is limited only by your imagination. MaiTai can export a Java Webstart application or a QuickTime movie..."

Experian and Société Générale both have invested in the NetBeans Platform, by using it as the basis of one or more of their applications. And these two are not exactly small organizations. Experian is a global leader in consumer and business credit reporting and marketing services and a constituent of the United Kingdom's FTSE 100 index, with revenues in excess of US$4 billion, while Société Générale is France's second-largest bank by market value. How do I know that these organizations are using the NetBeans Platform? By looking in the dev@openide.netbeans.org mailing list...

“KS – 2009®” is the world’s 1st Karnaugh Map Solver for handheld devices. Karnaugh Maps are used to normalize complex digital circuits to reduce the requirements and complexity of hardware while implementing Digital Logic circuits. Mobile devices being so easy to access, this software will be a boon for all those digital circuit designers who are very often confronted with the problem to normalize complex digital circuits, and find normalization procedure using Karnaugh maps manually, very time consuming and difficult.

The NetBeans team is pleased to announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta. NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta is the first IDE to offer support for the entire Java EE 6 spec. Highlights include support for JSF 2.0/Facelets, Java Persistence 2.0, EJB 3.1 including using EJBs in web applications, RESTful web services, and GlassFish v3. The IDE's integration with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for hosting open-source projects, now offers full support for JIRA and improved instant messenger and issue tracker integration. PHP support has been extended to include the Symfony framework and PHP 5.3. The release also supports the JavaFX SDK 1.2.1 ...

The JavaFXpert RIA Challenge is underway. The java.net JUGs Community reports: Java Champion Jim Weaver has a serious JavaFX contest going on. "Create an application in JavaFX that exemplifies the appearance and behavior of a next-generation enterprise RIA (rich internet application)". Entries must be submitted in the form of a NetBeans project by 00:00 GMT on 10 January 2010.

Take the JavaFX Survey! Danny Coward, reporting on the survey, said: "Don't
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8Vj3otRr4Q">bottle up any
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuSUUPHuSRo">unexpressed
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO-v5Iit3IE">opinions about
href="http://javafx.com/">JavaFX, take the survey. Mixed in with the usual snoozeville multichoice questions about the kind of project you work on, you get to rate the current feature set and rank the importance of new features the team's working on: tooling, more controls, performance...."

We recently published Biswajit Sarkar's article Using the Payment API for Microcredit and Other Applications". This week's Economist magazine is featuring a special report on mobile banking in emerging markets, titled "The power of mobile money": "mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world’s poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal services, allowing information to move more freely, making markets more efficient and unleashing entrepreneurship ... With such phones now so commonplace, a new opportunity beckons: mobile money, which allows cash to travel as quickly as a text message..."

Janice Heiss interviewed Kirk Pepperdine on the topics of performance tuning and cloud computing: "java.sun.com (JSC): In your talks, you always warn developers that they must carefully evaluate any generic advice that you provide to see if it applies to a particular situation. Why is this so important? Pepperdine: While I do give generic advice, I carefully explain that people have to evaluate it to see if it will work. I am giving advice in a vacuum, so what may work for many people most of the time may be very detrimental in other contexts. I don't know in advance what specific problem someone is working on..."

The Media Streams Player Project has announced the release of Version 1.0.0: "Aalhamdulillah! Most probably this is going to be the very first release of a complete cross-platform media player which is written in the Java Programming Language. Media Streams Player is entirely written in the Java Programming Language using the Java Media Framework (JMF) API. This cross-platform media player can play Video & Audio files of most of the popular media file formats on different popular Hardware & OS platforms. This application is currently under development. But this demo version which is ready to be released is a stable version of the application. End users of the application can use the Windows version of the media player just downloading & installing the Windows executable of Media Streams Player. They can find it at the Home Page of the project located at the given URL."

Terrence Barr announces 4 New Screencasts: LWUIT, JDTF, JSR 290, and JavaCard: "Our documentation team has put together four brand-new screencasts on current subjects. They are 5 minutes each in length and a great way to get introduced quickly to the highlights of each topic. I encourage you to have a look..."

The java.net Java Communications Community announces that SIP Communicator now supports file transfers: "The SIP Communicator project is proud to announce that it now supports file transfer for most protocols supported by SIP Communicator. Starting from build 2002 SIP Communicator users would be able to share files via the XMPP, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ and AIM protocols. You can download the application at http://download.sip-communicator.org This implementation is part of an effort funded by the NLnet foundation. However, early research on the subject started long ago and many have contributed."

Jim Wright interviews Mario Fusco, creator of the Lambdaj Project, in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne: "Lambdaj is a library that makes easier to manipulate collections in a pseudo-functional and statically typed way. In our experience to iterate over collection, especially in nested loops, is often error prone and makes the code less readable. The purpose of this library is to alleviate these problems employing some functional programming techniques but without losing the static typing of java. We impose this last constraint to make refactoring easier and safer and allow the compiler to do its job. In a word, lambdaj partially eliminates the burden to write (often nested and poorly readable) loops while iterating over collections by allowing to filter, convert, group, aggregate and sort their items without to write a single explicit loop."

Sonya Barry moderates a roundtable discussion with the Alice Team in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne: "Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Created at Carnegie Mellon University, Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming..."